Livin' Small

So. I’ve finally reached that point that I got a pair of bifocals. Mind you I did not intentionally buy them. I went for my annual checkup and saw a new optometrist in the practice I usually go to. He did the usual flip this lens to that lens. Is this good or is this one better. After a series of yes’ and no’s we settled on the right ones and I was checked for contacts, I hope. They’re my main reason for going anyway. I just asked for measurements for glasses because I had not bought a pair since 1992. I don’t wear them very often anyway, because I love my contacts. I got the newest, latest style this time, which are the narrow kind as opposed to the big rounder looking lenses. Today I was told my old ones were back in style. Go figure.

Anyway, I was not told the prescription was for bifocals. I tell you that as fact. I do have bad hearing, but aside, I do not remember being specifically told I was given a prescription for bifocals.

So off to the Sears Optical Shop and I handed my prescription to the optician and he said nothing about it. I picked out some frames I wanted as you see in the picture and they were off to be made just for me.

Two weeks later I go back, and as usual I’m not in a mood to take my contacts out to fit the glasses. The optician did fit the frames to my face, but I said if they don’t help me see right I’ll be back. So off we go because we had to stop and exchange an internet modem/wireless router and a trip to Sam’s and get home.

Well, we had to get our internet back up after we ate and I go off to the office and set it up and get the laptops and phones back online and proceed on down to the bathroom to get ready for bed. I do my ritual of removing contacts and putting on glasses for the night. Weeelll, when I put on the new glasses I looked down and got dizzy immediately. Wow!

My little girls looked up at me, but to me they were a total blur. I looked up and could plainly see. Then it hit me. They’re bifocals. I looked down at my hands up close and I could see my hands in the bottom part of my glasses. YES! They are bifocals. I take my girls outside before bed a that moment and almost trip down the steps. I can’t see them when looking down. My, is this going to be a challenge.

When I come back in I ask Libby if she heard myself or anyone in the doctor’s office speak of me getting bifocals. No, was the answer. Libby informed then she had been wearing bifocals for years and I’d get used to them. Another new thing I now know about Libby. I did not know her glasses were bifocals. GEEZ!! We’re both officially old people!

I guess I’ll do just that. Get used to them. Hopefully, eventually I’ll get to like them. Another hurdle to overcome. It’s either that or wear contacts 100% of the time. No glasses. That I can’t do since my unassisted vision is 20/400.

I’m good. Time is on my side. Now back to solving the world’s problems. HA!

To start my day I kiss my honey and roll out of bed. Toast and coffee and the morning news while sitting on the couch get me moving. Libby and I plan on church at eight thirty. We make it in time with no time to spare. It was a good hour with church friends and a good service about the planting of seeds.

After church, a stop by the Pig for some link sausage and some bacon and I’m back home and Libby is off to see her children in Greenville. I ate the sausage and bacon on bread and watch a little bit of TV.

After two days of walking, talking and shopping, the parade, the drive to Morehead City and back, I’m pooped. My head hurts and my eyes are burning, so what do I do? I go back to bed around eleven and sleep till almost four.

Dealing with the death of my brother and contending with my attorney over a new court date has sapped me of most of my mental energy and it has affected me physically.

Last weekend I did something I did not know if I could do or not and that was the most exhausting. It was a whirlwind day of going to church in my old church where I grew up and then down the road to the Christian Church which was across the road from where I grew up. They were having homecoming and had an open invitation for all from the Baptist Church to come have lunch with them.

I saw many people I had not seen in like forty years or less for some others. It took me on a trip on the Way-Back machine. Then at two in the afternoon we gathered for a Memorial Service for my brother Mike. He had become my closest brother over the last several years. Not that I didn’t have some sort of liking to him before that. It’s just that growing up he was six years younger and when you’re sixteen and he’ s ten, you just don’t let the “kid brother” hang with the older crowd. By the later years we’d lost Tim and Danny. That left him and me and the youngest brother Jamie “Tad”. Tad lives in Hawaii. I never really had anything in relation to him. He was just learning to walk when I left for the Army. Nineteen years separates the getting to know someone simply because of that much age difference. Now it’s the Alpha and the Omega. Him and me. That’s all that’s left of a family of seven. Mom and dad have been gone for a good while.

I’m not going to bemoan the obvious other than I’m the oldest of the family that’s left and I don’t plan on going anywhere for quite some time yet. I feel that God changed my life to what it is now for reason of keeping me alive. I was dying in the previous life I had. Libby came along and brought me back around. I love my sons, but I could not live with my wife any longer. That I won’t go into. Enough said.

Libby has given me a very positive outlook on life and unlike some couples on their second relationship I feel like I cannot continue to live without her. She says the same about me. I feel as though I knew her in a previous life and we’d just picked up where we left off. We sing the same songs at the same time as though on queue without thought. We think the same things that can only be described and that of an extraordinary happening, like I’m no regular patron of Sonic Drive-in, yet the other day I was thinking a foot long coney and some tates tots would be good. When I said this to Libby she turned to me with a look and said, “I was thinking the same thing. We’d never both been to the Sonic together in over three years of being together. We’d never even mentioned in that time of going there.

I sit here waiting for her to return from Greenville, hoping she had a good day with her son and daughter. I’m sure her son is still a bit skeptical of me, but rest assured I think he’s a hard working, well disciplined young man who knows responsibility. He has the same growing pains of learning life, but he handles it pretty good.

Lib’s daughter, Beverly, has had her ups and downs, but she has a full-time job and supports herself and her son of twelve years old. I hope her only the best as I do her son. I would not interfere with Lib and her children. They are important to her as any mom would be. I just wish I had a relationship with my sons, but I don’t see that happening until I’m so sick I can’t enjoy their company or I die. They took their mom’s side in the divorce and refuse to believe I have done what I did to preserve myself.

I was slowly losing my faculties with anxiety attacks and depression. I made decisions that weren’t the best. I had burned out from serving in a church that eventually found its way to me with the axe. I’d finally become the husk that I’d seen many others come to be. It was hardly a month after my separation that the pastor who’d I’d served for decades died of a heart attack at his desk. I cannot say he was anything but a great teacher of the Word, but he was terrible with people. I often wondered why many good preachers who sought him out would disappear without so much as a wisp. I knew, but didn’t express why. They’d found him to be a bore and full of self-loathing. I credit him this because of him being an only child. I don’t believe he ever developed social skills. Anyone reading this that knew him may not want to say so, but I can rest assured they know of what I speak.

My wife of those days was cast to the wind when his daughter graduated from college. Nepotism comes to mind. After so many years of dedication to the church she felt abandoned and it led her on a downward spiral into depression. They had a “Julie” Sunday and everyone told her how important she was, yet all of that rang like a spoon clanging in an empty can. I was embarrassed not only for her, but myself as well. I knew from that my days were numbered in this church.

I can’t say I’m without blame in things. I misjudged a situation and got myself in too deep and had to repent, yet I had been stung with remorse over it. I never recovered fully. I had been marked. I also have had other issues and all of it has taken a course to recovery of which I have come to know makes for a hard life, yet now I’ve made my peace with God over it all. I just wish my family would realize they can’t live with unforgiveness in their hearts. It will only lead them to an early grave. I want a relationship with my sons, yet I’m not going force myself upon them. They have to want to see me.

So here it is. It’s Sunday evening 20131111 and I’ve had a much deserved day today. God has blessed me and I’ve talked to Libby and she’s had a good day with her children and is on her way home. I’m rested and in my right mind. My heart is clear and I hold not one single thing against anyone. I have my girl on the way home and the other three, Paige, Sarah and Fiesta lying on the couch with me asleep.

I hope all who read this know one thing. No matter how dark it gets, daylight is on the way. Get your sunglasses out.

I sometimes deal with thoughts that don’t have simple answers. Many years ago I thought about space. Space outside of this atmospheric ball we live on. The thought of the infinity of space boggled my mind. There’s no end to it. But what if there is. What’s on the other side of space? Intriguing. Are we living in a never ending expanse of space or are we a cosmic order in a quart jar in some kid’s bedroom?

Another thing that makes one think. Time. Just what is time? We Westerners have three tenses in time, but the Hebrew language and understanding has only two. Past, present and future are easy to live with because that’s all we’ve been taught. The Hebrews have a continuum of time consisting of past and future together and where we live at this moment is somewhere on that line. This gave me a whole new look at the thought processes of the Bible. I, if not you, separated the past from the future and the two never really touch. Oh, I believe in eternity, but that was relegated to the future only, when in fact the past and the future exist in the same “place” called eternity. How else could a prophet tell the future if all of time didn’t exist all at the same time, so to speak. God, as we know Him, exists in eternity. He says things like “I knew you when you were in your mother’s womb”.

In the process of salvation, the Bible says Jesus died for everyone. He went into the grave (Hell) and retrieved all who died in the faith. Then He also brought about the ability of rebirth spiritually while still in the physical body. In His dying on the cross He gave everyone eternal life past and future. Your name was written in the Book of Life then. Not at the time of your acknowledgement of Him. The blotting out of a person’s name from the Book of Life comes from rejecting the gift of salvation when the wooing of the Spirit comes upon a person. I’ll step out on a limb here and say everyone is already given the ability to be saved. It simply requires the acknowledgement of this gift. Rejection will relegate one upon death of the physical body to the grave (Hell).

I can say someone has said why do you put Hell in parenthesis next to the word grave. It’s because the translations from the Hebrew and Greek for grave is Hell. Not some eternally burning place. Remember to read in Revelations 20:13-15- And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead which were in them; and they were judged, every one of them according to their deeds. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.

Okay, sorry, I got carried away. I could and have lost friends over my studies. The Bible is a complex book. I’m not a main stream Christian. I don’t hold to traditional Christian beliefs. To me it’s not a religion, it’s a lifestyle. You either are or aren’t. No middle ground.

If you’re atheist or of some other religion, I don’t condemn you or say it’s my way or the highway. There’s a lot of things out there we don’t know about. Everyone is due their own opinion or belief. Just be all you can be at what you do believe.

I’m not sure about the future. It is safe to say that the government has become so contentious that “We, The People” have become mere pawns in political games. All this going on leaves me with no foundation on which to stand on other issues. What are those issues?

1. My finances were put in jeopardy over a personal issue I won’t divulge more of at the moment. Safe to say I know I can and will overcome it IF the government can get their act together.

2. Buying into the “Affordable Healthcare” system. Now there’s a can of worms. Libby has not had any coverage for two years. She can’t afford it. The only good side to that is she’s a very healthy woman and requires only her yearly health checkup. She pays everything “out of pocket”.

3. This is the most heartbreaking issue of all. My brother, Mike, was once a strapping three hundred pound man who could handle most every situation with ease. He was a heavy duty man for heavy duty work. He drove long-haul trucks, heavy equipment and had settled down in one place as a site supervisor over the burying of coal ash from power plants in the Virginia, North Carolina area. He nows weighs 180 pounds and constantly in pain. He takes medication powerful enough to kill some men.

I suppose this last issue is more imposing on me than any other, making them miniscule compared to it. Impending death trumps most any issue in life. I like to listen to music while I type sometimes and thought for some reason to listen to Blind Melon. Then I realized it was Shannon Hoon. He died by way of suicide. How tragic from someone who made some pretty good music.

But, I ran off on a rabbit trail. This period of time has made me become emotional again. Let me ramble for a bit. Please? My mind goes several different directions, depending on my self-diagnosed ADHD. I have no real enduring attention span. That’s pretty evident here.

I shall try to get back to my purpose for this post.

I am the oldest of five brothers. I’ll be 63 the 25th of this month 2013. I’ve lived many years through one trial to another with some pretty good moments smattered in between them. I consider the trials character building times in life that can be effectively used in later life to make overcoming issues much easier.

I expected my parents to pass on before me, but not at such young ages in today’s standards. My mom died at 63 or so in 1999 and my dad died at 60 in 1990. They were in poor health. Dad died of congestive heart failure and mom by way of an abdominal aortic aneurysm. She had a stroke previously and that’s when they found the aneurysm. I firmly believe the medical community sentenced her to a death by telling her it was inoperable. An aneurysm to me isn’t inoperable. She was declared indigent. That’s why she was told such a thing.

The reality of life came more in 2002 when I got word that my brother Timmy had committed suicide. He put a shotgun in his mouth and blew his head off. I’ll not say anything more graphic than that. Depression is an evil demon. I know. Firsthand. I did not know a lot of the details, but he was doing the best he could. I hope those who read this can understand the human nature of the want to be free of pain and depression. He’d been injured several years earlier and had chronic neck pain that left him embroiled in agony. After mom died he became reclusive and lived in the old home place where he was in over his head debt from he and mom trying to remodel the house. He was disabled and could not work and he sought no financial relief. He lived in the house without power or water for months on end with no communications outside of his local contacts. His medication at some point was cut off because he couldn’t pay for it. He turned to growing marijuana. He was smart, though. He’d grow it over a large area in very small plots so as to not be detected by overhead surveillance. He was not a seller. He only wanted it to ease his own pain. It was his self prescribed medication. Finally all came to a head and he decide to take his life. I’d lost a younger brother.

In 2006 I was leaving work and was just clearing the staff entrance at work when my phone rang. It was Karen. Danny’s wife. She was in tears. Danny had died of a heart attack. He was 54. He had a stroke at 34 and had been disabled from that time from Civil Service. During this time he’d managed to live as best he could, but as with dad he succumbed to congestive heart failure. During his last years he rode his four-wheeler over 25,000 acres of cotton fields collecting boll weevil traps or delivering papers. He did whatever he could to make ends meet. He was still playing his music with a country western band when he could. Brother number two was gone.

Mike has now been battling cancer for over a year now. The first of this year the doctors didn’t think he’d live past spring this year, but here it is October. He’s fought hard and has kept his sanity in the process, but outside entities don’t make it easy. The hospice who delivers his pain meds to him at his home found out he had a settlement from a lawsuit with his previous employer and they decided they wouldn’t deliver anymore till he signed over the entire amount to them. He refused. I don’t blame him. Maybe he should take Tim’s cue, eh? I’m not one to break laws, but desperation has it’s on course in life. He had thought at one time this hospital called “The Cancer Treatment Center” would take him. Trouble is, they don’t want you without insurance. No charity in this hospital. I’ve listened to them and the only thing they seem to deliver outside of ordinary courses of treatment are hype. He could get the same treatment in his own area hospital, if they had a heart to realize sick people need care. He is disabled and is eligible for care. I feel extremely bad for him. Lib and I will likely take a trip up to see him on my birthday next week. I also feel for Debbie. She’s a nurse and in some ways that doesn’t help, because she’s more aware of the ramifications of his diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. She knows the physical signs and such. I pray for her as well. They had planned on marrying, but cancer cancelled those plans. I’m afraid that all too soon I’ll have lost brother number three.

That leaves only the youngest brother Jamie (Tad). I’ll have to risk saying this, but I’m always concerned for his health. He claims for his lifestyle he’s considered an old man at 44. He’s the only brother who could possibly outlive me.

In all I’ve brothers that I love and loved. I sometimes wonder why I’m still as healthy as I am. I’m not immune to the ailments of people my age. I guess I’ve taken after my mom’s side of the family. Her mom and dad almost made it to 80. All her sisters with exception of one lived to ripe old ages and Aunt Doris is still kicking it at 87. She’s fought off cancer twice while seeing two of her children succumb to cancer. She lost the youngest son to an accident and her first husband to a heart ailment. Her second husband has also passed on, but she’s very enduring. She’s my only connection to at large family on mom’s side. Oh, of course there’s Martha and Wanda her daughters.

Dad’s side of the family is still around this area of the world. His sister and her husband live in Morehead City. There are cousins still around. I don’t feel I’m giving my thoughts full explanation here, but to say I’ve missed family over the years.

Between my former wife and church I was kept busy. So busy I had no time for my family, although I was led off to my former wife’s family functions most anytime during 37 years of marriage. I lost track of my own family and friends. Facebook may seem to be the bane of some or a lot of people. I don’t know for sure, but it has led me back to my roots. I’ve quite a list of friends from back in my youth. I don’t intend to lose them. They are my connection to sanity just as Libby is. Ah, Libby. I can’t write anything without including her. She makes me smile.

One things a surety. Faith in God. He’s always seen me through. In my mid-fifties I was dying slowly. Dying slowly of perhaps mid-life crisis. Maybe unresolved issues with church and family. I don’t know. I just know I would likely be in worse health now if not for the change of paths in my latter 50’s. God blessed me with a much better position at work, Libby making my life more sane and old and new-found friends. He also saw fit for Lib and me to find a new church family. I thank God for this new life. I know He’s taking care of us, in spite of what gets thrown at us.

How is it that turmoil reigned in my life in my fifties? How is it that church, marriage and life in general became so engulfed in the flames of a horrid force that drove me near the brink of losing my faculties?

Life had all but handed me death on a platter. I made bad judgment in trying to help someone else and it cost me. I worked unceasingly to the point of being seared of any emotional reasoning. Lost were the feelings of why I came to God and service to Him. Anxiety attacks, and depression became a daily exercise of life. The feeling of sitting in a room and suddenly getting that feeling something ominous was about to overtake one such as myself. I wanted to run, yet reasoning gripped my spirit and soul and held me in place. Reasoning told me in the midst of an anxiety attack that if I ran would not the same fear I ran from accompany me on my journey away from that place? Why certainly, it would.

The bad judgment I made I confessed and was forgiven, yet the anguish of the deed still persisted in my mind. It paralyzed me to the point that it began to affect me physically. At the end of it all I was diagnosed as having had a heart attack, yet upon complete evaluation it was found my heart was unaffected by such calamity. I was told anxiety had played a cruel trick on me to the point my cardiologist said the initial tests said otherwise.

I then settled it in my heart even with no feelings or emotions for my faith, family or profession that it was my lot in life and I was to serve out my sentence as a lost soul till the grim reaper came for me.

Still I could not settle for this any differently than a prisoner can stand to look at the bars of his prison and think he’s in a good place. I felt marriage was no longer what I had envisioned it to be even after 36 years of marriage at the time. I started searching for why I felt this way and found many reasons to not continue that path, yet confined myself to it so long as I abided by the tenants of my upbringing that once you marry that it’s for life.

I searched the laws of divorce. I catalogued my findings, yet I could not find the nerve to make the break happen. I was still, for the moment, too fearful of all that was before me if and when I did act on it. My wife would argue, I would argue. It seemed our relationship depended on arguing. She had tried to leave me in about the seventh year of marriage and again about the time all this was going on with me. I should have let her go her way then. The break would have been much easier.

To the root of my recovery. Several months later in the 37th year of marriage I had settled back to starring through the bars of my prison with surrender. My wife and I had dwindled our marriage to being a business partnership. No romance existed and our only contact was with frivolous talk and arguments. We had nothing more in common. We’d grown irreparably apart. Yet my heart was not able to follow through.

Then something happened that became a catalyst to my inability and eventually made the move I had looked at from afar for so long. I came even closer to losing my mental stability during the following months. I sought spiritual counseling and a former Navy Chaplain told me to find someone from the secular realm to counsel with because most Christian counselors he knew were more capable of beating me over the head with a Bible and telling me what I’d done wrong more so than guiding me to correction and civil minded decisions once again. So I sought such counseling and was soon able to deal with the break away from my traditional beliefs.

At about this same time I had met someone in the same situation I was in and she had separated from her abusive husband of 34 years and the first time we met it was as though we’d known each other for eons. Perhaps we had. She had dated and/or hung around with my brother when they were in school together. We were like two broken-winged birds who came together and we nursed each other. My psychologist called her my “shiny new toy” and she would wear off after a while. How much do some people know? That was four years ago. We’re still together stronger than ever. She has been the instrument of God to bring sanity back to my life. I’ve been given the privilege to introduce her to a deeper knowledge of God. We talk together, we laugh together, we weep together. We enjoy the full range of emotions together. We found God together. Now we have a new church family and we know they love us.

I can’t describe what I see in her eyes when she looks at me. They dance with excitement. Her lips spread into a full teeth grinning smile and explodes with light from within. Her arms wrap around me in such a way my whole body trembles in her embrace. I cannot describe in words what I feel when we are together. No night goes by that we don’t talk for at least an hour before we drift off to sleep. Even after all this time, we still have much to talk about. We’re never at a lost for words. I’ve never had that before in my entire life. She’s a light in the darkness I walked in for quite a few years prior.

Libby is indeed the love of a lifetime. The love of my life. I take responsibility for her care. I cover her. I’m been given reason to live again. She is that reason.

If the fly who flew

Through the pile of poo

Would only wipe his feet

Before he lands on my beet

It might not be so bad.

If the worm with the squirm

Would only learn

I only want to fish

To put something on a dish

It might not take so long

To put him on the prong

If the lizard had a gizzard

I introduce him to Eddy Izzard

And maybe make him

A tranvestite comedian,

But he’s already committed To GEICO

So what do I know.

If a snake named Jake

Were to come up from a lake

I know for sure he’s a water snake

He’d slither on by

And just say hi

And I’d doff my hat

Right where I sat

And say be on your way.

Well, so much for my mind today. I think I need to go back to bed.